[perihelions]

Just anchor it to the oceanic crust. If you're unafraid to spool cable 37,000,000 meters up, you shouldn't be afraid to also spool down 50 meters or so—the maximum depth of the equatorial Sunda shelf[0] in the SEA region. Convenient to Singapore.

(Singapore itself is roughly 10% former ocean, terraformed).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunda_Shelf

[mattmanser]

And now you've just got lots of different complications, like that seawater is very corrosive.

[wantoncl]

> And now you've just got lots of different complications, like that seawater is very corrosive.

Is it as corrosive as lightning? All space elevators will encounter that problem pretty regularly.

We've been running cables under the ocean for over a century now, there's ways to address seawater corrosion and intrusion.

[nkrisc]

I find it difficult to imagine a scenario where building a space elevator is possible but sea water corrosion is an insurmountable problem.

[mattmanser]

If you're building the base of the elevator in water, your whole operation is basically operating in water.

The effort to do that is huge.

It's basically a big over complication.